The Long Weekend at Tate Modern (22 – 25 May)

The Long Weekend 2009 will transform Tate Modern this bank holiday weekend with a programme of dramatic live events and free, interactive activities.

Now in its fourth year, this major arts festival celebrates extraordinary moments of fusion between different art forms such as performance, film, installation and music.

Programmed to animate the works included in the annual rehang of Tate Modern, the four-day event attracts over 100,000 visitors each year.

This year’s festival is inspired by the opening of a new wing of displays, Energy and Process, which explores Arte Povera, Post Minimalism and their legacy of merging art and life together by using humble, everyday materials and viewer participation. Visitors of all ages will be invited to experience music, film, performance and workshops that illuminate the ideas and spirit behind this art movement and to play a part in iconic art works by renowned artists such as Robert Morris and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

The House of Fairy Tales, a child-centred, artist-led project established by Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis, will host a village fete with a twist. Taking over the lawns in front of Tate Modern, they will offer games, workshops, puppetry and storytelling to children of all ages and their families. The quirky, art-inspired activities will climax in a Maypole made of recycled materials.

Throughout the four day festival, the galleries will be filled with music. The cellist, Neil Heyyde, will bring Jannis Kounellis’s poetic work Untitled (1971) to life by playing next to the painted extract from the score of Bach’s St John Passion. This is the first time that this piece by the seminal contributor to the Arte Povera movement will be on display at Tate Modern.

Contrappunto Dialettico Alla Mente 1968 by Luigi Nono, one of the most important avant-garde composers of the twentieth century and a contemporary of many of the key figures of Arte Povera, will reverberate around the galleries – using speaking voices cut up, speeded up and in every way disrupted to create a soundscape reminiscent of the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Nono’s tape includes noises from the Rialto fish market and the bells of San Marco, incorporating poems about the murder of Malcolm X and protests against the Vietnam War.

Ommagio a Vedova (1960) and Musiche per Manzu (1969) will add to the atmosphere in the galleries. Both have their origin in the works of two artists. Ommagio a Vedova is intended to parallel but not imitate the work of painter Emilio Vedova, , avoiding an “impossible translation, or worse, description in sound” Musiche per Manzu was conceived as the soundtrack to a film about the Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzù. Nono’s clouds of sound rival the concentration and density of large objects.

La fabbrica illuminata (1964) includes texts by Cesare Pavese (sung by a soprano), which rage against the industrial machine recordings of factory sounds. Dedicated to the workers of the “Italsider” complex in Genoa, this collision between the individual and the brutality of their society has become an iconic example of radical art.